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Cinemark signs deal to buy Rave Cinemas

Cinemark is expanding its reach again with is purchase of Rave Cinemas over the weekend. After Carmike purchased 16 of their screens last month, Cinemark is now buying everything else from the chain that reportedly brought in $228 million in revenue last year.

Any word on which Rave Cinemas are on the list? In Michigan, Rave operates cinemas in Ann Arbor, Flint and Kalamazoo, but they earlier announced that their Kalamazoo location will close and be taken over by another operator early next year after renovations.

Cinemark is generally okay – apart from their new builds which don’t contain proper masking for scope features, at least I was told this by a manager at their Stroud Mall location (I hope he was wrong, his logic is “because most movies aren’t made for scope these days – this new location doesn’t contain masking for scope movies”). Um-kay: there’s someone who has no idea what he’s talking about, it’s not like the academy ratio.

My take on Cinemark is that they have evolved; their theaters built in the early 1990’s (many of them discount multiplexes with garish interiors – for example was the Willoughby Hills 10 in Ohio had headache-inducing chartreuse walls with checkerboard tile floors with video games all over the place) had then-common shoebox auditoria often with mono sound and undistinguished projection.

But by the beginning of the new century, and especially after the company became a major player and it acquired the Century and CineArts brands, their theaters became far more luxurious and comparable to any of the best of the recently-built megaplexes. My most recent visit to a Cinemark-owned theater was at their Century 9 in San Francisco and it was a first-class experience.